Robert E. Valett (22 November 1927 to 14 November 2008) was an American psychology professor who wrote more than 20 books primarily focused on educational psychology. He earned the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association and was a president of the California Association of School Psychologists.
Charles Egerton Osgood (20 November 1916 to 15 September 1991) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Illinois.
He was known for his research on behaviourism versus cognitivism, semantics (he introduced the term “semantic differential), cross-culturalism, psycholinguistic theory, and peace studies. He is credited with helping in the early development of psycholinguistics. Charles Osgood was recognised distinguished and highly honoured psychologist throughout his career.
Douglas Harvey Dick (20 November 1920 to 19 December 2015) was an American actor and occasional screenwriter. His most famous role came in the 1948 film Rope. In 1971, Dick left the entertainment industry to work as a psychologist.
Wilhelm Dilthey (19 November 1833 to 01 October 1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G.W.F. Hegel’s Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin.
As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey’s research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history’s status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.
Penelope Jane Leach CBE (née Balchin; born 19 November 1937) is a British psychologist who researches and writes extensively on parenting issues from a child development perspective.
Leach is best known for her book Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, published in 1977, which has sold over two million copies to date and won the BMA award for “best medical book for general audiences” in 1998. Leach notes in the introduction to that book: “Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to put things right or make the best of those that are wrong.”
Anna Elisabeth “Lise” Østergaard (18 November 1924 to 19 March 1996) was a Danish psychologist and a politician in the social-democratic party. Under Anker Jørgensen’s leadership, she was Minister without Portfolio (1977-1980) and Minister of Culture (February 1980 to September 1982). As a psychologist, she was head of psychology in Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet (1958) as well as the first woman to become professor of clinical psychology at Copenhagen University (1963), a position she resumed after her political career ended in the mid-1980s.
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (Russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский; Belarusian: Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі; 17 November 1896 to 11 June 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on psychological development in children. He published on a diverse range of subjects, and from multiple views as his perspective changed over the years. Among his students was Alexander Luria and Kharkiv school of psychology.
He is known for his concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD): the distance between what a student (apprentice, new employee, etc.) can do on their own, and what they can accomplish with the support of someone more knowledgeable about the activity. Vygotsky saw the ZPD as a measure of skills that are in the process of maturing, as supplement to measures of development that only look at a learner’s independent ability.
Also influential are his works on the relationship between language and thought, the development of language, and a general theory of development through actions and relationships in a socio-cultural environment. This can be found in many of his essays.
Patrick Colonel Suppes (17 March 1922 to 17 November 2014) was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology. He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010 was the Director of the Education Program for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.
Oliver John Braddick, FBA, FMedSci (16 November 1944 to 17 January 2022) was a British developmental psychologist who researched infant visual perception. He frequently collaborated with his wife Janette Atkinson.
Braddick was Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University from 2011 to 2022. Prior to that, from 2001 to 2011 he was professor and head of the Department of Experimental Psychology.
Braddick gained a BA (1965) and PhD (1968) in Experimental Psychology at Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1968 and 1969 he was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Lorrin Riggs, Brown University, USA. In 1969 he returned to Cambridge as a University Demonstrator; later he became a lecturer and then reader. By 1976, Braddick was an active member of the Cambridge Visual Development Unit, along with Janette Atkinson, his wife. The unit carried out pioneering research on the development of visual cortical function in infancy and in early visual screening. He also advanced understanding of binocular processes of both infants and adults.
In 1993, Braddick moved to University College London, together with Janette Atkinson, as professors of Psychology. He became head of the Psychology department in 1998. In 2001, he was elected fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, was appointed Head of Psychology at the University of Oxford, and became a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. In July 2012, Braddick was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, for his contributions in the field of visual perception and its development in early childhood. Braddick was also a member of the Visual Development Unit at the University College of London and University of Oxford, a unit that specialises in child visual perception.
Braddick was a member of the editorial board for Current Biology. He died on 17 January 2022, at the age of 77.
David Émile Durkheim (15 April 1858 to 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Much of Durkheim’s work was concerned with how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are much less universal, and in which new social institutions have come into being. Durkheim’s conception of the scientific study of society laid the groundwork for modern sociology, and he used such scientific tools as statistics, surveys, and historical observation in his analysis of suicides in Catholic and Protestant groups. His first major sociological work was De la division du travail social (1893; The Division of Labour in Society), followed in 1895 by Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method), the same year in which Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology and became France’s first professor of sociology. Durkheim’s seminal monograph, Le Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, especially pioneered modern social research, serving to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The following year, in 1898, he established the journal L’Année Sociologique. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
Durkheim was deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of institutions, understanding the term in its broader meaning as the “beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity,” with its aim being to discover structural social facts. As such, Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic in the sense that sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the study of specific actions of individuals.
He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Some terms that he coined, such as “collective consciousness”, are now also used by laypeople.
Robert E. Valett (22 November 1927 to 14 November 2008) was an American psychology professor who wrote more than 20 books primarily focused on educational psychology.
He earned the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association and was a president of the California Association of School Psychologists.
Daniel N. Stern (16 August 1934 to 12 November 2012) was a prominent American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst, specialising in infant development, on which he had written a number of books – most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985).
Stern’s 1985 and 1995 research and conceptualisation created a bridge between psychoanalysis and research-based developmental models.
Paul Drummond Cameron (born 09 November 1939) is an American psychologist. Cameron has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay extremist. While employed at various institutions, including the University of Nebraska, he conducted research on passive smoking, but he is best known today for his claims about homosexuality. After a successful 1982 campaign against a gay rights proposal in Lincoln, Nebraska, he established the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS), now known as the Family Research Institute (FRI). As FRI’s chairman, Cameron has written contentious papers asserting unproven associations between homosexuality and the perpetration of child sexual abuse and reduced life expectancy. These have been heavily criticised and frequently discredited by others in the field.
In 1983, the American Psychological Association expelled Cameron for non-cooperation with an ethics investigation. Position statements issued by the American Sociological Association, Canadian Psychological Association, and the Nebraska Psychological Association accuse Cameron of misrepresenting social science research.
William Schutz (19 December 1925 to 09 November 2002) was an American psychologist.
In 1958, Schutz introduced a theory of interpersonal relations he called Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO). According to the theory three dimensions of interpersonal relations were deemed to be necessary and sufficient to explain most human interaction: Inclusion, Control and Affection. These dimensions have been used to assess group dynamics.
Schutz also created FIRO-B, a measurement instrument with scales that assess the behavioural aspects of the three dimensions. His advancement of FIRO Theory beyond the FIRO-B tool was most obvious in the change of the “Affection” scale to the “Openness” scale in the “FIRO Element-B”. This change highlighted his newer theory that behaviour comes from feelings (“FIRO Element-F”) and the self-concept (“FIRO Element-S”). “Underlying the behavior of openness is the feeling of being likable or unlikeable, lovable or unlovable. I find you likable if I like myself in your presence, if you create an atmosphere within which I like myself.”
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